Matt Taibbi On Goldman Sachs

If you haven’t been reading Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi on the ubiquitous government presence of the Goldman Sachs investment bank, what are you waiting for? Here’s a teaser from his long, detailed history of the company’s entanglements with a succession of administrations (if reading’s not your thing, you can watch him talk about it here):

The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pumpanddump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumercredit rates, halfeaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

Taibbi recently augmented his well-reported screed with an extended blog post on Goldman’s recent report of gargantuan profits since the beginning of the year:

So what’s wrong with Goldman posting $3.44 billion in second-quarter profits, what’s wrong with the company so far earmarking $11.4 billion in compensation for its employees? What’s wrong is that this is not free-market earnings but an almost pure state subsidy.

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